Photography and Jewish History

Five Twentieth-Century Cases

Amos Morris-Reich

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780812253917
• eBook ISBN: 9780812298529
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

It is a sign of the accepted evidentiary status of photographs that historians regularly append them to their accounts, Amos Morris-Reich observes. Very often, however, these photographs are treated as mere illustrations, simple documentations of the events that transpired. Scholars of photography, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the photographs themselves, relegating the historical contexts to the background. For Morris-Reich, however, photography exists within reality; it partakes in and is very much a component of the history it records. Morris-Reich examines how photography affects categories of history and experience, how it is influenced by them, and the ways in which our understanding of the relationship between history and photography can be theorized and reoriented.Morris-Reich here turns to five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect: Albert Kahn's utopian attempt to establish a photographic archive in Paris in order to advance world peace; the spectacular failed project of Helmar Lerski, the most prominent photographer in British Mandate Jewish Palestine; photography in the long career of Eugen Fischer, a Nazi professor of genetics; the street photography of Robert Frank; and the first attempt to introduce photography into the study of Russian Jewry prior to World War I, as seen from the post-Holocaust perspective of the early twenty-first century. Illustrated with nearly 100 images, Photography and Jewish History moves beyond a focus on Jewish photographers or the photographic representation of Jews or Jewish visibility to plumb the deeper and more significant registers of twentieth-century Jewish political history.

Chapter 1 UTOPIA and PHOTOGRAPHY CIRCA 1900

Albert Kahn and the Archives of the Planet

A utopian vision of global scope, explicitly tied to a forward-looking conception of photography, is at the center of Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet (Archives de la planète). Kahn was a French banker of Alsatian Jewish background who spent his legendary wealth creating his Archives of the Planet, the world’s largest color photography archive of his time, comprised of tens of thousands of photographs from all corners of the earth. Kahn was motivated by a utopian vision that photography could advance peace among peoples, but why and how could a large-scale project to photograph the world promote world peace? What assumptions about photography and history could have been the basis for such a goal, and were these assumptions realistic?

To answer these questions we must delve into the particulars of Kahn’s historical context, looking at photography and utopia around 1900, while also keeping in mind that Kahn’s project anticipated the globalization processes of the second half of the twentieth century, which sped up enormously with the creation and spread of fast means of information and communication, the World Wide Web, and particularly Google’s project of mapping and photographing every corner of the planet. Kahn’s ambitious endeavor was a precursor of this tremendous expansion of technology, including the unprecedented spread of photography and involving processes that are inseparable from the political processes of decolonization and democratization. These processes, which took place in the second half of the twentieth century, transformed the world but left wide areas of unresolved conflict in the Middle East and Africa.

Kahn’s endeavor was considerable in size, coherent in its underlying philosophy, systematic in its execution, and consistent over a long period of time. Like Henry Dunant and Frédéric Passy (who in 1901 were awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize for their involvement in creating the International Red Cross and the International Peace League), Kahn sought to create an elite international network for the purpose of promoting peace in the world, and his ambition and commitment were widely recognized and appreciated during his lifetime (though Kahn never won the peace prize). And while studying Kahn’s vision of a photographic archive to promote world peace involves studying photography and utopia around 1900, it also, simultaneously, offers the opportunity to contemplate, from the postcatastrophic perspective of the early twenty-first century, the ostensibly inherent capacity of photography to rationalize sight, expand communication, and enhance understanding among peoples.

One of the most important pieces written on Kahn’s photographic project, Jay Winter’s compelling and moving appreciation of Kahn’s work, situates it in precisely this broader context of the twentieth century: specifically, the twentieth century’s violence and utopian visions of peace.¹ While deeply sympathetic to Kahn, the chapter leaves the overall impression that Kahn’s vision in general and his photographic project in particular are uplifting, but finally illustrative of a naïve outlook on history, politics, and photography. In this respect Winter judges Kahn’s work as a failure overall.² And looking at Kahn’s photographic project in the light of the two world wars that followed, one of which Kahn experienced and the other of which he escaped only because he died shortly after the German occupation of Paris, seems to prove Winter’s assessment. When I embarked on researching and writing this chapter, I shared the slightly melancholic sense that Kahn’s vision illustrated a beautiful but ineffective idea about photography and its possibility of human uplift.

But the more, and the more deeply, I read about Kahn’s various engagements, the more I realized that this understanding had to be reassessed. Among the very few things that Kahn wrote was a short, programmatic document in which he sought to explain the institutions he had established.³ The recontextualization of the photographic project thus has to be undertaken pragmatically, by reconstructing and reinterpreting its relative place within the larger structure of Kahn’s philanthropic endeavor. I devote the first part of this chapter to analyzing the relative position of the Archives of the Planet within Kahn’s more comprehensive philanthropic efforts. When the photographic project is situated within this larger structure, it appears less naïve than it does in Winter’s account. Photography, as employed in Kahn’s project, was a form of action. His project linked photography with a conception of the rationalization of human communication. I propose that Kahn’s projects cannot be seen as a failure, even if they finally succumbed to more powerful historical forces.

After situating the Archives of the Planet, I go on to show that photography was not arbitrarily or naïvely chosen for the task given to it by Kahn but was in fact picked as the result of very clear reasoning. To determine what photography was expected to do, I reconstruct the specific logic that underlay its introduction and use. Fundamentally, as I seek to show, it was intended to enhance communication and to transform human vision.

But first, I briefly describe the photographic project and outline several aspects of Kahn’s projects that involve tensions and even apparent contradictions within his outlook. These tensions, I believe, not only serve as instruments of historical contextualization but point to the inherent boundaries and blind spots of Kahn’s outlook. The question of Kahn’s agency with regard to the photographs in the archive is a thread that runs through the chapter as a whole, and to which I return in the concluding part of the chapter. Although the archive as first initiated by Kahn was a collection for still photography, he later added moving images, and the two categories of images are at least partially integrated within the archive. Other writers, most notably Paula Amad, the author of the only monograph on Kahn, have studied both of these components, but their primary focus is on the moving image. Because this book concentrates on still photography, however, my treatment of Kahn’s photographic archive is necessarily partial. But as we will see, this partiality is not without its advantages.

The unique aspect of Kahn’s case, as compared with the subjects of the subsequent chapters, is particularly interesting from a performative perspective and pertains to Kahn’s agency with regard to the photographs that were produced for an archive he established but which were not taken by him. This issue is present throughout the chapter and directly addressed in three contexts: first, concerning a decision to standardize the archive technologically; second, with respect to the role of Jean Brunhes, whom Kahn appointed as the scientific director of the archive; and finally, in the concluding part of the chapter, with regard to the rationalization of sight and vision.

CIRCUMSTANCES, CONTEXT, AND QUESTIONS

Several writers have suggested that Kahn’s idea to create a photographic archive had its origins in a trip he took in 1908 to the United States, Canada, Japan, and China. Alfred Dutertre, his chauffeur and traveling companion, took photographs during the trip, and this was what triggered the idea of the archive for Kahn.⁴ His basic idea was simple: to send photographers to every possible corner of the earth, have them take photographs, and collect the photographs in a central archive. This would reveal the fundamental similarities among people from distant parts of the world.⁵

Photography was particularly suitable for this purpose. As a neutral, objective, mechanical means of communication, photography had clear advantages over other means of imaging or illustration. The archive, which opened in 1908 and operated until 1931 (when Kahn’s fortune eroded following the stock market crash), consists of more than seventy thousand autochrome photographs. These photographs were taken all across the planet with the intention of capturing and containing a world that stood on the threshold between the traditional and the modern, the local and the global, and all with a view to facilitating international peace and cooperation. During the two decades of the archive’s activity, eleven independent cameramen and photographers were employed in more than forty countries.⁶ After Kahn lost his fortune, the archive ceased to operate as an active project, but Kahn’s passion for the “mutual comprehension of peoples and international rapprochement” continued until his dying day.⁷

Kahn’s disposition, as a person and as a philanthropist, probably has something to do with the fact that the photographs in the archive are traditional in their visual language and do not partake of the kind of aesthetic experimentation associated with the modernistic avant-garde. What the photographs do share, irrespective of the photographer and of the society photographed, and what goes to the core of the archive, is the fundamental dignity of humans. Humans are treated with dignity regardless of skin color, nationality, class, or geography. This feature of the archive is consistent, and it is maybe most apparent where an element of inhumanity is present in the subject of the photograph: where, with a slight shift in treatment, the photograph might otherwise have expressed mockery, voyeurism, or ridicule. I have in mind several extreme and atypical photographs from the archive: a horrifying photograph of the decaying corpse of a soldier from a World War I battlefield; disquieting photographs of chained or incarcerated individuals in Mongolia; a person in handcuffs being led by policemen in Greece. In all of these, human dignity is preserved.

It is not unrelated to this preservation of human dignity, in my view, that the autochrome photographs taken before the outbreak of World War I offer a reassuringly optimistic depiction of Western Europe. One can find evidence of hardship and poverty, but even there, the Europe that is shown is content and, on the whole, at peace with itself. There is a certain irony built into any retrospective observation of these photographs of Western Europe: Seen from our postcatastrophic viewpoint, the progressive, forward-looking perspective of the times that is evident in the images strengthens the viewer’s sense that the photographers partook in the blindness that characterized the societies they were photographing. This feature of the photographs, however, is not accidental, but seems to be related to the status of politics in the photographic archive and in Kahn’s outlook.

This is not the only apparent tension with regard to any attempt to contextualize Kahn’s outlook and projects. Several tensions and even contradictions seem to touch the core of his photographic project and of his outlook and vision. Some of the tensions were surely much less clear to his contemporaries than they became later. For instance, Kahn made his fortune through a set of successful investments in diamond mines in South Africa. From our postcolonial perspective, there most certainly is a tension involved in using a fortune made in the context of the colonial exploitation of African laborers to establish a philanthropic foundation for the advancement of humanistic ideals.

But if this tension is diachronic or historical, there are other synchronic or horizontal tensions that also appear. Kahn perceived himself as a universalist and a humanist who, like many of his contemporaries, abhorred anything German as chauvinistic and antihumanist, without seeing the contradiction between the two stances. Universalism was synonymous with French nationalism, and hence there was no problem with centering the projects in France and using the French language exclusively.⁸ These tensions span all of Kahn’s projects; other tensions are specific to the photographic project.

The explicit aim of the archives was to advance mutual knowledge and mutual recognition through acquaintance with foreign peoples, landscapes, environments, and forms of life. But the archive was closed to the broader public; it was only accessible to a very small group of invitees.⁹ I will return later to the discussion of utopias, but for now let me just say that attempting to classify Kahn’s activities within Karl Mannheim’s classical opposition between “ideology” and “utopia” seems to lay bare a basic tension in Kahn’s utopian outlook. According to Mannheim, “utopian” ideas are those that attempt to undermine the social and political status quo, whereas “ideology” attempts to maintain it.¹⁰ From this perspective it is difficult to conceive of Kahn’s vision or projects as utopian.

Kahn’s photographic archive was supposed to advance human liberation, but the very notion of the archive became deeply problematic in the second half of the twentieth century and would come to be understood as a site of domination and repression. Appreciating this tension, Paula Amad, the author of the most comprehensive and thorough study of Kahn’s Archives of the Planet, depicts the project as a “counter-archive” instead. While I appreciate this designation, and it is pretty clear what she means to indicate by it, there is little in Kahn’s own understanding of the archive that would support this depiction, and for the sake of historical understanding it may be more beneficial to face what now reads like the oxymoron, built into Kahn’s vision and project, of a “utopian archive.”

When we look more closely at the photographic project itself, additional tensions crop up. As Winter and other observers have noted, Kahn’s photographic documentation was intended to undermine the pattern of white men photographing nonwhite others as animals in the zoo.¹¹ It was built on a deep respect for human heterogeneity and on a notion of mutual interaction and exchange of ideas. But in practice the photographers were in fact white, European, French, and almost exclusively male, reestablishing the already existing asymmetries of power...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Utopia and Photography circa 1900: Albert Kahn and the Archives of the Planet
• Chapter 2. The Boundaries of Photographic Intention: Helmar Lerski’s “Failed” Project
• Chapter 3. Album of an Extinct Race: Eugen Fischer and Photography
• Chapter 4. Photography for Its Own Sake: Robert Frank and The Americans
• Chapter 5. Photography and Rupture: S. An-sky, Solomon Yudovin, and the Documentation of Russian Jewry
• Conclusion. Photography and Democracy
• Notes
• Index